Man Reading a Newspaper, daguerreotype by John Plumbe, Jr., ca. 1842; J. Paul Getty Museum, Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

For this Tuesday’s Tips I have listed some newspapers and indexes to newspapers that are available online for free, but are not found in the “usual” free newspaper sites (Digital Library of Georgia or Chronicling America, etc.) that you may regularly check.

I have kept an ongoing list of these free sites for myself, so after double-checking to verify those links, I came up with what follows. They are now divided into those for certain Georgia cities, miscellaneous Georgia cities, for the South (outside of, but pertaining to Georgia), and last, sites for some Civil War-era newspapers.

These sites are useful for photo historians, genealogists, and other historians searching for a particular name or event, especially for Georgia and the South. Whether a search on one of these sites leads you to another site online, or to a library or archive for a newspaper on microfilm, I hope there is something here “just for you.”

Georgia: Charlton County

The Charlton County Archives has both Digests of (1892-1945) and Indices to (1908-1945) the Charlton County Herald 

See them both at http://www.charltoncountyarchives.org/  You can search each of the Herald Digests and the Indices by using your Chrome, etc. Find function.

Georgia: Dahlonega

On Internet Archive you will find a few issues of The Mountain Signal for 1864 and 1867, and incomplete runs of The Advertiser / The Signal Advertiser /  The Signal & Advertiser  for 1876-77, The Signal / The Dahlonega Signal for 1884-88, The Dahlonega Nugget for March 1890, The Dahlonega Signal for 1893-Feb.1896, and The Dahlonega Nugget for Oct. 1896 – Dec. 1905.

These issues are only a part of the Andrew W. Cain Newspaper Collection at the University of North Georgia. The full collection dates are 1864-1963 and those issues not online must be seen on site. The issues are housed at the University’s Archives and Special Collections Department, in the Library Technology Center.

You can search these online issues via the Internet Archives search function box at top right; you can also enlarge and scroll through the pages (set on single page) to read advertisements, obituaries, legal notices, etc. of possible interest to you. Use the University of North Georgia Libraries Subject Guides to link to the online issues on AI at  http://tinyurl.com/nyjx3wu

Georgia: Milledgeville

There is an index for Milledgeville Georgia’s Southern Recorder “Newspaper Clippings vol. IV 1836-38” compiled by Margie Glover Daniels at  http://tinyurl.com/l79buuw Search this multi-page document PDF using your Find function.

You are probably aware that full issues of the Southern Recorder for these particular dates (1836-38) are on the Digital Library of Georgia / Galileo site, but by also using this index you can learn appropriate search terms to use for the DLG issues, which will often turn up additional newspaper articles.  http://tinyurl.com/mwgn3hr

Click on any image to enlarge

Newspaper advertisement, 1891 

Georgia: Miscellaneous

The site Newspaper Abstracts has been around since 2000.  Abstracts are found here from newspapers around the United States, as well as from outside the U.S.A.  The site is updated periodically and if you are interested, you can help add to this site with your newspaper transcriptions. http://www.newspaperabstracts.com/

There are miscellaneous Georgia newspaper abstracts here which are listed under each county on this page http://tinyurl.com/pbfzv44 The number of abstracts available that reference a particular county is given in parentheses. Note that some counties have no (zero) abstracts.

You can perform both a simple and an advanced search of the Georgia (or other state) abstracts; the Advanced Search button is on the top menu bar. Remember that your search results will list abstracts to newspapers from other cities and/or other states whenever an article from that city/county was printed in that out-of-region newspaper.

I have found abstracts for Georgia newspapers here that I have not seen elsewhere (for free) including the Newnan Herald (Newnan), The Paulding New Era (Dallas), the Eastman Times and the Talbotton New Era.

You will very occasionally find a citation dated incorrectly, and you will run into advertisements for Ancestry.com and other “paid” genealogy sites, but please don’t let that deter you from using this valuable site.

The South (outside of, but pertaining to Georgia)

Transcriptions of various Georgia and many other Southern and miscellaneous newspapers are online at a website compiled by Vicki Betts. This librarian for the University of Texas at Tyler has done us all a great service by sharing her research information and her indexes here with her Civil War Newspapers site.

Betts’s interests are “mid-19^th century U.S. history, particularly Southern women during the Civil War; and the history of Smith County, Texas, also focusing on the Civil War, particularly the Camp Ford POW facility near Tyler.”  Her site includes her discussion of How to do Newspaper Research, 1860-1865, with a “how to cite” the newspapers. Also on this page are her links to “Topical Files” and links to the “Newspapers by Title,” as well as to full articles.

Many of these transcriptions are of advertisements, which are very useful to my research topic, as it may be to others’. The Georgia newspapers and articles transcribed are from Albany, Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, and Savannah.

Betts also provides a link here to her Index for the 1855-1865 Godey’s Lady’s Book . You can do a complete search for words and or phrases throughout the entire site.

Newspaper advertisement for O. R. Lane’s Gallery & Temple of Art, Atlanta, GA,  June 1868

Joyce McKibben at the University of Memphis compiled an online index to the Memphis Appeal, 1843-1869, with a separate obituary index for 1843-1899 and a separate obituary index to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1894-1900.

There is also an index here to the Memphis Bulletin for 1860 and 1863-1867;  to the Memphis Enquirer for 1836-1840, 1846-1849, 1850 and 1851; and to Civil War in Memphis Newspapers, 1860-1866 [note that the Betts site listed above also includes articles from The Appeal, 1860-1864, including those published in Atlanta].

It is useful to begin with McKibben’s “Introduction and Guide to Subject Headings.” http://tinyurl.com/l86w7ld

The Southern Christian Advocate

Wofford College keeps an online index of obituaries that have appeared in the Southern Christian Advocate since it began in 1837, and in its successor newspaper, the South Carolina United Methodist Advocate. http://tinyurl.com/pwd28ws

There is an explanation on searching the Index, and what procedures to follow to get a copy once you find the obituary you need.

If the Southern Christian Advocate  obituary you need was published in an issue of this newspaper in 1862-1869 (when it was published first in Augusta, then in Macon, Georgia) you may be able to see it online at the University of Florida, George A. Smithers Library site. This site also allows you to print. Here is a link to the list of all these newspapers that FSU has in digital form.

Finally, there are also abstracts to Marriage Notices from the Southern Christian Advocate 1867-1878 on the USGenNet site at http://tinyurl.com/mmlcbwk

Rice Culture on the Ogeechee, near Savannah, GA, illus. by Alfred R. Waud, Harper’s Weekly, Jan. 5, 1867; digital image from LOUISiana Digital Library’s Harper’s Weekly: a Journal of Civilization and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper collection 

Three additional newspaper sources, particularly good for Civil War-era research 

Harper’s Weekly, the Journal of Civilization 1857-1912 (Harper’s Weekly Journal and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper).  The search function is located on this page http://tinyurl.com/nektxac  You can see the images from these publications here via Browse, or via slide show under ‘About This Collection’.

By clicking on an image you can bring up the image in full (you can expand or contract this) and below it you find a citation and brief transcript of the article and/or a description of the image.

This is a part of the LOUISiana Digital Library – you can also get to the magazine/newspaper from their home page – go to “collection name” and click on “Harper’s Weekly Journal and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.” Included in these publications are images by artists Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast, Alfred Waud, and others. http://tinyurl.com/n824ne2

Almost 1400 issues of The Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 1860 through December 1865, are found on the Richmond University site http://imls.richmond.edu/d/ddr/

This site is a collaboration between the University of Richmond, Tufts University, and the Virginia Center for Digital History. You can either Search or Browse the newspapers from this main page. You have a choice of viewing a page as text or as an image, and each page can be searched. This is another site where valuable advertisements were indexed and are available.

Macon, Georgia, in The Illustrated London News, October 3, 1863, vol.43, no.1224, p. 341; digital image Courtesy of “The Civil War in America from the Illustrated London News”: A Joint Project by Sandra J. Still, Emily E. Katt, Collection Management, and the Beck Center of Emory University

Finally, Emory University’s Beck Center for Electronic Collections has a wonderful digital collection called “The Civil War in America from The Illustrated London News”; this site has a very good bibliography, a link to only the illustrations,  a link to only the articles, and an excellent Search function.

I hope something you found here piqued your interest and can help you in your own Hunting and Gathering. It’s useful for me to have these selected, off-the-beaten-path Georgia-related newspaper sources all in one place.  I know they can be searched and located via various other online sites and perhaps I need not go to the trouble of creating my list. But I did, and if I decide I can keep it updated, I will put a link to this information on Google Drive for anyone’s use.

 © E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without  written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. The piece can be re-blogged, and excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.